Stanley Sheinbaum : Applying His ACLU Past to New Role on Police Commission

Stanley K. Sheinbaum marked his 70th birthday almost two years ago, at an airport hangar in Santa Monica big enough to hold 800 of his closest friends. The crowd was impressed when the guest of honor arrived in a rickety World War II Marine fighter plane. But Sheinbaum was disappointed because doctors had blocked his initial plan to parachute in.

The theater was appropriate. Critics and friends both tend to consider this man of many intense pursuits as a parachutist--popping into unfamiliar situations. But few would deny his ability to alter the status quo. Sheinbaum’s varied careers helped define centers of power and controversy for 30 years. Now, Sheinbaum, past chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, is president of the Los Angeles Police Commission. It says much about law enforcement here that he considers this his toughest assignment.

In the mid-1950s, Sheinbaum served as the U.S. director of the Michigan State University project in Vietnam. He discovered it was a CIA front and, disillusioned, he became an early and prominent critic of the Vietnam War. Later, he went to Greece, where he covertly obtained vital evidence that led to the release of his fellow economics professor, Andreas Papandreau. Papandreau became prime minister, but he was then slated for execution by a military junta. In 1977, Sheinbaum was appointed to the UC Board of Regents where, for 12 years he hammered out positions in favor of divestment of interests in South Africa and control of the U.S weapons labs at Livermore and Los Alamos. Perhaps Sheinbaum’s most controversial role was his stint as Middle East peacemaker--working with the foreign minister of Sweden to get Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat to recognize Israel. Sheinbaum received a dead pig and a number of death threats for his troubles.

At one of the many parties at his home to support some liberal cause or another, no less then five past Democratic presidential candidates showed up to pay tribute to this man who prides himself on backing losing national candidates, while remaining suspicious of those who win. Referring to his prominent support of George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, John Anderson, Walter F. Mondale and Eugene McCarthy, he scoffs at the Los Angeles Times Magazine’s description of him as a king maker.

Sheinbaum, who is married to artist Betty Warner Sheinbaum, is publisher of New Perspectives Quarterly, a political journal. In this interview, conducted at The Times during a break in the commission’s search for a new police chief, Sheinbaum agreed to discuss a wide range of controversial issues.

Question: After many careers, you’re now the “commish.” What do you hope to accomplish as president of the police commission? What’s your interest?

Answer: I grew up on the streets of New York City. There were gangs and other problems. Not like now--but there was a precious working relation between the cop and the community in which he was pounding the beat. I think, for the health of the community, there has to be that sort of working relationship, and that’s what I hope to accomplish. I’m not better than anybody else, but I do have a commitment to a good society and time to work on that.

Q: What is the relevance of your ACLU background?

A: It helps me know the limits of individual rights as they bump into the needs of a community at large, and that is a matter of judgment and balance.

Q: After a year on the police commission, are you more sympathetic to the police?

A: Undoubtedly, I know better--having driven around in police cars at night--what the jeopardy is to them as they go into situations in which they don’t know who is armed and who is not; and they then have to make quick decisions about use of force to protect themselves--let alone protect the community.

Q: Has your opinion about whether the department is racist changed?

A: I don’t think the department is any more racist than the society around it; the real problem is that, to the extent that the society is racist, you’re going to find pockets of racism in the department. Don’t expect the people on the force to be pure, when the community around them has racist impulses. Yes, as a result of police apprehension, some have racist interpretations, and some respond with brutality. I desperately want to help reduce both.

Q: That sounds a lot more pro-cop than one would have expected from the former chairman of the ACLU.

A: I understand that. But I am seeing it now from the inside. I’m hardly a law-and-order type--but these police are working stiffs who are there to get a job done under terrible conditions.

Q: And their obligation to civil liberty?

A: It is the police who are the professionals and are trained--or should be--to restrain themselves and not overstep.

They are there to protect law and order, to protect the community against itself--and that creates a self-righteousness that they are doing something good. Self-righteousness is a trap for anybody--and it becomes a rationale for overstepping. That is the tendency on the police side that has to be held in check. They still have a responsibility to observe the rights of the people, some of whom may be uncontrollable. But it is the police obligation to protect those rights.

Q: What are you looking for in the new police chief?

A: A man of intelligence who understands, on the one hand, the professionalism of the police--how a police force has to be efficient but whose objectives don’t get totally inundated with the technical drive for proficiency. He has to also have a sense of community, and an ability to lead his men so that they have the same respect for the community. And he has to deal with the pockets of racism and brutality that are inevitable--since the department is never going to be anything more than a reflection of the community.

Q: What goal best defines your varied careers?

A: I think helping to keep a liberal voice alive.

Q: Sometimes you’re referred to as a “limousine liberal.”

A: . . . . That phrase has a specific meaning: That anyone who’s wealthy is hypocritical if he asserts a concern for those not as well-off. It’s meant to impeach anybody who’s doing anything of social import, social value. Think about the things I do, don’t think that I may wear a Brooks Brothers suit. I used to wear a lot of Brooks Brothers suits. I don’t anymore--I’ve gone a little more chic.

Q: But is your concern for the poor and underprivileged vicarious?

A: I never went to college until my late 20s. I came out of high school during the Depression, hustling for work in a poor neighborhood in New York. A lot of people were suffering, and it registered. When I wasn’t unemployed, I worked as a garment worker and lithographer for six years, and then in the army for four.

When I got out of the army, in 1946, back from the Philippines, I went to Oklahoma A&M; and then Stanford--where I became an instructor in economics. The GI Bill was available. That was the best investment this country ever made in the manpower of America . . . .

Q: Where did your leftism come from?

A: I was a good Stevensonian Democrat. I think the radicalism started in the ‘50s. I became closely involved in Vietnam while administering a major technical-assistance program run through Michigan State University right after the U.S. took over from France, in 1954. Part of this technical project was a CIA front, and I became very critical of that.

I was coordinator of the U.S. part of the program and discovered the CIA connection when I went to Saigon, after two years in the U.S., recruiting people . . . . While there, I realized the CIA comprised about a fourth of the operation.

I wasn’t permitted to find out what they were doing. It was interesting--the Vietnamese knew what they were doing, but the head of the project couldn’t find out. I asked questions that led to an argument when I got back on campus. I know that people in our group wrote the (South Vietnamese) constitution. It’s hard for me to say what people were involved in the torture exercises. But it’s believed some of them were.

Q: What disillusioned you in Saigon?

A: The CIA and MAGG--the military advisory group in Saigon--wanted to take the police that Michigan State was training and use them as paramilitary forces in violation of the Geneva Accords . . . .

Just before I made that first trip to Saigon, I was involved in discussions in Washington, where, I am delighted to say, Michigan State held the line--didn’t want to be involved in what would have been a violation of the accords of 1954. As I put it together later on: MAGG and the CIA were running with the ball anyway.

One night the U.S. ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow, who they were bypassing, knocks on my door . . . and wants to know what decisions were being made in Washington that he wasn’t being informed of. . . . Imagine, the CIA and MAGG were making these decisions in Saigon, while the ambassador, who the average lay person would think would be in charge, did not seem to be in charge.

Q: The Michigan State project involved training the Saigon police--any connection with your current job?

A: One-quarter of the program in Vietnam was in police administration. Michigan State happened to have a police administration school. In those days, I even enlisted L.A. Police Chief Bill Parker’s help in recruiting for me. He was a very interesting man with a steel-trap mind. I was always intrigued by his desire for an efficient, almost militaristic department--and yet the desire to be in touch with the community at large. In the early ‘60s, when I was at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Bill Parker used to come up, for conferences on urban problems, with Daryl Gates driving him as his chauffeur.

Q: Yes, but your tenure as chairman of the ACLU put you in conflict with people like Parker and Gates. Are you more in sync now with the police?

A: I think it’s an interesting problem and one the public doesn’t understand. Especially now, in this last decade or two, with the quantum leap in crime on the streets, and gangs and shootings. I listened, just the other day, to seven of the area captains telling a group of us how they go about dealing with that. There’s impressive stuff going on. But it’s tough stuff. Down there in the housing projects, the minute something goes awry and there’s a shooting, certain leaders will say the police were at fault. They are not always at fault. It’s not a new insight; I used to have my fights with the ACLU.

Q: And the principles of the ACLU?

A: Above all, you’re a civil libertarian. Those are principles--free speech, due process, minority rights, etc. Those are principles that you stick with all the time. You don’t violate those principles expediently because it seems easier.

But you have to understand the context of stress that the police are in. One of the things we have to become good at is analyzing the use of force. We have to have an understanding of why a cop is in his right to shoot in a certain situation, but not in another . . . . In the old days, when I was with the ACLU, I didn’t have that confidence. I couldn’t go in and sit in on the evaluation of a certain shooting. We look at maybe 10 to 12 shootings a week, anything involving the use of force. Some is justified, some is not.

Q: Recently, you found yourself and family threatened by an ex-son-in-law, who is reputed to have put out a murder hit on you. That will focus the mind.

A: When you got a hit out on you, you don’t know the scope of it. The guy who was originally supposed to do this turned informer. But the guy in jail, my ex-son-in-law, still has money and access to a phone. We worry he’s got to be angrier than ever now. He may be turning some other guy onto it. So we are careful.

Q: Now you are in the crime victim’s position, what does that do to your sense of civil liberty and prisoners’ rights?

A: I would like this guy not to have access to a phone, but I accept, as a principle, his right to a phone to talk with his attorneys. There are enough bad charges made that those protections are important. If you don’t have a fair trial and all those protections--due process, legal representation and so forth--you then get arbitrariness. And arbitrariness is at the heart of non-democratic societies . . . .

All I want for this guy is a fair trial. If I could pay the judge, would I do it? No. I wouldn’t want anyone else to do it, either. Some people would say, “It’s dreaming. That’s why liberals can’t get anywhere.” Screw them--you either have principles or you don’t.